A
technology revolution is fast replacing human beings with
machines in virtually every sector and industry in the
global economy. Already, millions of workers have been
permanently eliminated from the economic process, and
whole work categories and job assignments have shrunk,
been restructured, or disappeared. Global unemployment
has now reached its highest level since the great
depression of the 1930s. More than 800 million human
beings are now unemployed or underemployed in the world.
That figure is likely to rise sharply between now and the
turn of the century as millions of new entrants into the
workforce find themselves without jobs.

Corporate
leaders and mainstream economists tell us that the rising
unemployment figures represent short-term
"adjustments" to powerful market-driven forces
that are speeding the global economy in a new direction.
They hold out the promise of an exciting new world of
high-tech automated production, booming global commerce,
and unprecedented material abundance. Millions of working
people remain sceptical. In the United States, Fortune
magazine found that corporations are eliminating more
than 2 million jobs annually. While some new jobs are
being created in the US economy, they are in the
low-paying sectors and are usually temporary.

This
pattern is occurring throughout the industrialised world.
Even developing nations are facing increasing
technological unemployment as transnational companies
build state-of-the-art high-tech production facilities,
letting go millions of cheap labourers who can no longer
compete with the cost efficiency, quality control, and
speed of delivery achieved by automated manufacturing.

With
current surveys showing that less than five percent of
companies around the world have even begun the transition
to the new machine culture, massive unemployment of a
kind never before experienced seems all but inevitable in
the coming decades. Reflecting on the significance of the
transition taking place, the distinguished Nobel laureate
economist Wasilly Leontief warned that with the
introduction of increasingly sophisticated computers,
"The role of humans as the most important factor of
production is bound to diminish in the same way that the
role of horses in agricultural production was first
diminished and then eliminated by the introduction of
tractors."

In all
three key employment sectors - agriculture,
manufacturing, and services, machines are quickly
replacing human labour and promise an economy of near
automated production by the mid-decades of the
twenty-first century.

1. No
More Farmers

The
high-technology revolution is not normally associated
with farming. Yet some of the most impressive advances in
automation are occurring in agriculture. New
breakthroughs in the information and life sciences
threaten to end much of outdoor farming by the middle
decades of the coming century. The technological changes
in the production of food are leading to a world without
farmers, with untold consequences for the 2.4 million
people who still rely on the land for their survival.

The
mechanical, biological, and chemical revolutions in
American agriculture over the past 100 years put millions
of farm labourers out of work, transforming the country
from a largely agricultural society to an urban,
industrial nation. In 1850, 60 percent of the working
population was employed in agriculture. Today, less than
2.7 percent of the workforce is engaged directly in
farming. There are more than 9 million persons living
under the poverty line in depressed rural areas across
the United States - all casualties of the great strides
in farm technology that have made the United States the
number-one food producer in the world and made American
agriculture the envy of every nation.

Although
the farm population is less than 3 million, it sustains a
food industry employing more than 20 million. In our
highly industrialised urban culture, most people would be
surprised to learn that the food and fibre industry is
the single largest industry in the United States. More
than 20 percent of the GNP and 22 percent of the
workforce is dependent on crops grown on America's
agricultural lands and animals raised on feedlots and in
factory farms.

The
decline in the number of farms is likely to accelerate in
the coming years with advances in agricultural software
and robotics that will lead to higher yields and fewer
workers.

A new
generation of sophisticated computer-driven robots may
soon replace many of the remaining tasks on the land,
potentially transforming the modern farm into an
automated outdoor factory. Israel's farmers are already
well along the way to advanced robot farming. Concerned
over the potential security risks involved in employing
Palestinian migrant labour, the Israelis turned to the
Institute for Agricultural Engineering for help in
developing mechanical farm labourers. In a growing number
of kibbutzes it is not unusual to see self-guided
machines travelling on tracks laid out between rows of
plants, spraying pesticides on crops.

The
Israelis are also experimenting with a Robotic Melon
Picker (ROMPER) that uses special sensors to determine
whether a crop is ripe to pick. The introduction of
ROMPER and other automated machinery will dramatically
affect the economic prospects of the more than 30,000
Palestinians employed during harvesting season. In the
United States, Purdue University scientists say they
expect to see ROMPER in use "in every Indiana county
by the end of the decade." Similar robots are being
developed with artificial intelligence to plough and seed
fields, feed dairy cows, even shear live sheep.
Researchers predict that the fully automated factory farm
is less than 20 years away.

New
gene-splicing technologies, which change the way plants
and animals are produced, are greatly increasing the
output of animals and plants and threatening the
livelihood of thousands of farmers. To eliminate the cost
of insecticides and the labour required to monitor and
spray crops, scientists are engineering pest-resistant
genes directly into the biological codes of plants. Some
of these transgenic plants can produce a continuous
supply of the specific toxins to kill invading insects.

Genetic
engineering is also being used to increase productivity
and reduce labour requirements in animal husbandry.
Bovine Growth Hormone (BGH) is a naturally occurring
hormone that stimulates the production of milk in cows.
Scientists have successfully isolated the key
growth-stimulating gene and cloned industrial portions in
the laboratory. The genetically engineered growth hormone
is then injected back into the cow, forcing the animal to
produce between 10 and 20 percent more milk. A study
conducted several years ago predicted that within three
years of the introduction of BGH into the marketplace,
upwards of one-third of all remaining US dairy farmers
may be forced out of business because of overproduction,
falling prices, and dwindling consumer demand.

Scientists
have succeeded in producing genetically engineered pigs
that are 30 percent more efficient and brought to market
seven weeks earlier than normal pigs. A faster production
schedule will mean less labour is required to produce a
pound of flesh. In 1993 researchers at the University of
Wisconsin announced a successful attempt to increase the
productivity of brooding hens by deleting the gene that
codes for the protein prolactin. The new genetically
engineered hens no longer sit on their eggs as much. They
do, however, produce more eggs.

The
coming together of the computer revolution and the
biotechnology revolution into a single technological
complex foreshadows a new era of food production - one
divorced from land, climate and changing seasons, long
the conditioning agents of agricultural output. In the
coming half century, traditional agriculture is likely to
wane, a victim of technological forces that are fast
replacing outdoor farming with manipulation of molecules
in the laboratory.

Chemical
companies are already investing heavily in indoor
tissue-culture production in the hope of removing farming
from the soil by the early decades of the twenty-first
century. Recently, two US-based biotechnology firms
announced they had successfully produced vanilla from
plant-cell cultures in the laboratory. Vanilla is the
most popular flavour in America. One third of all the ice
cream sold in the United States is vanilla. Vanilla,
however, is expensive to produce because it has to be
hand-pollinated and requires special attention in the
harvesting and curing process. Now, the new gene-splicing
technologies allow researchers to produce commercial
volumes of vanilla in laboratory vats, eliminating the
bean, the plant, the soil, the cultivation, the harvest -
and the farmer. While natural vanilla sells on the world
market for $1,200 a pound, Escagenetics, a California
biotechnology company, says it can sell its genetically
engineered version for less than $25 per pound.

Over 98
percent of the world's vanilla crop is grown in the small
island countries of Madagascar, Reunion, and Comoros. For
these tiny islands in the Indian Ocean, the indoor
farming of vanilla is likely to mean economic
catastrophe. The export of vanilla beans accounts for
more than 10 percent of the total export earnings of
Madagascar. In Comoros, vanilla represents two thirds of
the country's export earnings. According to the Rural
Advancement Fund International, more than 100,000 farmers
in the three vanilla-producing countries are expected to
lose their livelihood over the next several decades.

Vanilla
is only the beginning. The global market for food
flavours is hovering near $3 billion as is expected to
grow at a rate of 30 percent or more a year. According to
a Dutch study, upwards of 10 million sugar farmers in the
third world may face a loss of livelihood as
laboratory-produced sweeteners begin invading the world
markets in the next several years. In addition,
scientists have successfully grown orange and lemon
vesicles from tissue culture, and some industry analysts
believe that the day is not far off when orange juice
will be grown in vats, eliminating the need for planting
orange groves.

Martin H.
Rogoff and Stephen L. Rawlins, biologists and former
reseach administrators with the Department of
Agriculture, envision a food-production system in which
fields would be planted only with biomass perennial
crops. Using enzymes, the crops would be harvested and
converted to sugar solution. The solution would then be
piped to urban factories and used as a nutrient source to
produce larger quantities of pulp from tissue cultures.
The pulp would then be reconstituted and fabricated into
different shapes and textures to mimic the traditional
forms associated with soil "grown" crops.
Rawlins says that the new factories would be highly
automated and require few workers.

The era
of whole-commodities food production is likely to decline
in the decades ahead as chemical, pharmaceutical, and
biotech companies are able to increasingly substitute
tissue-culture production, significantly lowering the
price of food products on world markets. The economic
impact on farmers could be catastrophic. Many third-world
nations rely on the same of one or two key export crops.
Tissue-culture substitution could mean the near collapse
of national economies, unprecedented employment, and
default on international loans, which in turn could lead
to the destabilisation of commercial banking and to bank
failures in first-world nations.

Hundreds
of millions of farmers across the globe face the prospect
of permanent elimination from the economic process. Their
marginalisation could lead to social upheaval on a global
scale and the reorganisation of social and political life
along radically new lines in the coming century.

2. No
More Factory Workers

The
spectre of the world's farmers being made redundant and
irrelevant by the computer and biotechnology revolutions
is deeply troubling. Even more unsettling, the
manufacturing and service sectors, which have
traditionally absorbed displaced rural workers, are
undergoing their own technological revolution, shedding
millions of jobs to make room for reengineered, highly
automated work environments. Transnational corporations
are entering a new era of fast communications,
lean-production practices, and "just-in-time"
marketing and distribution operations relying
increasingly on a new generation of robotic workers. Much
of the human workforce is being left behind and will
likely never cross over into the new high-tech global
economy.

From the
very beginning of the Industrial Revolution, machines and
inanimate forms of energy were used to boost production
and reduce the amount of labour required to make a
product. Today, the new information and communication
technologies are making possible far more sophisticated
continuous-process manufacturing. Some of the most
dramatic breakthroughs in reengineering and technology
displacement are occurring in the automotive industry.
The world's largest manufacturing activity, auto
manufacturers produce more than 50 million new vehicles
each year. The automobile and its related industrial
enterprises are responsible for generating one out of
every 12 manufacturing jobs in the United States and are
serviced by more than 50,000 satellite suppliers.

Industry
experts predict that by the end of the current decade,
Japanese-owned factories will be able to produce a
finished automobile in less than eight hours. The
shortening of production time means fewer workers are
required on the line. Kenichi Ohmae, a leading Japanese
management consultant, notes that Japan's nine automakers
produce more than 12 million cars a year, with fewer than
600,000 workers. Detroit automakers employ more than 2.5
million workers to produce the same number of vehicles.

Following
Japan's lead, US automakers are beginning to reengineer
their own operations in the hope of increasing
productivity, reducing labour rolls, and improving on
their product share and profit margin. In 1993 General
Motors president John F. Smith Jr. announced plans to
implement changes in production practices that could
eliminate as many as 90,000 auto jobs, or one third of
its workforce, by the late 1990s. These new cuts come on
top of the 250,000 jobs GM had already eliminated since
1978. Other global automakers are also reengineering
their operations and eliminating thousands of workers. By
1995 industry analysts predict that German automakers
could eliminate as many as one in seven jobs. This in a
country where 10 percent of the workforce is either in
the automotive industry or services it.

As the
new generation of "smart" robots, armed with
greater intelligence and flexibility, make their way to
the market, automakers are far more likely to substitute
them for workers because they are most cost effective. It
is estimated each robot replaces four jobs in the
economy, and if in constant use twenty-four hours a day,
will pay for itself in just over one year. In 1991
according to the International Federation of Robotics,
the world's robot population stood at 630,000. That
number is expected to rise dramatically in the coming
decades as thinking machines become far more intelligent,
versatile, and flexible.

The steel
industry's fortunes are so closely related to those of
the automobile industry that it is not surprising to see
the same sweeping changes in organisation and production
taking place in the steel business. By the 1890s the
United States was the leader in steel production. Today,
that competitive edge has been seriously eroded, in large
part because of the failure of US companies to keep up
with Japanese steel manufacturers, which have transformed
steelmaking to a highly automated continuous operation.
Nippon Steel's new $400 million cold rolling mill near
Gary, Indiana - a joint venture with Inland Steel - is
run by a small team of technicians and has reduced the
production time from 12 days to one hour.

The
increasing automation of steel production has left
thousands of blue collar workers jobless. In 1980 United
States Steel, the largest integrated steel company in the
United States, employed 120,000 workers. By 1990 it was
producing roughly the same output, using only 20,000.
These numbers are projected to fall even more
dramatically in the next 10 to 20 years as new, even more
advanced, computerised operations are introduced into the
manufacturing process.

The new,
highly automated manufacturing methods are being combined
with radical restructuring of the management hierarchy to
bring steelmaking into the area of lean production.
Japanese companies, with joint ventures in the United
States, have reengineered traditional plant operations,
restructured management hierarchies and slashed job
classifications to improve efficiency. According to the
International Labour Organisation, finished steel output
from 1974 to 1989 dropped by only 6 percent in the
Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development
(OECD) countries while employment fell by more than 50
percent. More than one million jobs were lost in the
steel industry in OECD nations during this fifteen year
period. "In up to 90 percent of the cases,"
said the ILO, "the basic explanation for the
reduction in employment is therefore not changes in the
level of output but improvement in productivity."
[van Liemt, Gijsbert. Industry on the Move;
"Labor-Management Bargaining in 1992," Monthly
Labor Review.]

Other
industries that use steel to make products are also
undergoing a fundamental overhaul, reflecting the new
emphasis on lean-production practices. Between 1979 and
1990, employment in the metalworking-machinery industry
declined by an average annual rate of 1.7 percent. The
Bureau of Labour Studies predicts an overall loss of an
additional 14,000 workers by the year 2005. For
operators, fabricators, and labourers the decline in
employment is expected to be even higher, reaching 14
percent between now and the first decade of the coming
century.

In
industry after industry, companies are replacing human
labour with machinery, and in the process changing the
nature of industrial production. One of the industries
most affected by reengineering and the new
information-based technologies is rubber. Since the
1980s, tire companies around the world have been
restructuring their operations by introducing work teams,
flattening the organisational hierarchy, reducing job
classifications, instituting job retraining programmes
and investing in new equipment to automate the production
processes.

Less than
five years after the Japanese owned Bridgestone acquired
a Firestone facility in La Vergne, Tennessee, the
production increased from 16,400 to 82,175 tires per
month with blemishes declined by 86 percent. Goodyear
claims a similar success story. Goodyear earned a record
$352 million in 1992 with sales of $11.8 billion. The
company is producing 30 percent more tires than in 1988
with 24,000 fewer employees. The Bridgestone and Goodyear
experience is being duplicated in other tire plants
around the world.

The
mining industries, like agriculture, have been undergoing
a steady process of technology displacement since 1925,
when 588,000 men, nearly 1.3 percent of the nation's
entire workforce, mined 520 million tons of coal. In1982
fewer than 208,000 men and women produced more than 774
million tons of coal. With the use of advanced computer
technology, faster excavation and transportation
equipment, improved blasting technologies, and new
processing methods, mining companies have been able to
increase output at an average annual rate of 3 percent
since 1970. The Bureau of Labour Statistics forecasts a
yearly decline in employment of 1.8 percent through the
year 2005. By the first decade of the coming century,
fewer than 113,200 people - a labour force 24 percent
smaller than present - will produce all of the coal to
meet both domestic and overseas demand.

Not
surprisingly, some of the most significant strides in
reengineering and automation have occurred in the
electronics industry. General Electric, a world leader in
electronic manufacturing, has reduced worldwide
employment from 400,000 in 1981 to less than 230,000 in
1993, while tripling its sales. In the household
appliance industry, new labour and time-saving
technologies are eliminating jobs at every stage of the
production process. By the year 2005, a mere 93,500
workers - fewer than half the number employed in 1973 -
will be producing the nation's total output of home
appliances.

In recent
years, even the labour-intensive textile industry has
begun to catch up with other manufacturing industries by
introducing lean-production practices and advanced
computer automation systems. The goal is to introduce
flexible manufacturing and just-in-time delivery so that
orders can be "tailor-made" to individual
consumer demand. The new technologies are beginning to
make garment manufacturing in the industrial nations cost
competitive with firms operating in low-wage countries.
As more and more of the manufacturing process bends
toward reengineering and automation, even third-world
exporters, like China and India, will be forced to shift
from current labour-intensive manufacturing processes to
cheaper and faster methods of mechanised production.

In
virtually every major manufacturing activity, human
labour is being steadily replaced by machines. Today,
millions of working men and women around the world find
themselves trapped between economic eras and increasingly
marginalised by the introduction of new laboursaving
technology. By the mid-decades of the coming century, the
blue collar worker will have passed from history, a
casualty of the relentless march toward ever greater
technological efficiency.

3. The
Last Service Worker

While the
industrial worker is being phased out of the economic
process, many economists and elected officials continue
to hold out hope that the service sector and white collar
work will be able to absorb the millions of unemployed
labourers in search of work. Their hopes are likely to be
dashed. Automation and reengineering are already
replacing human labour across a wide swath of service
related fields. The new "thinking machines" are
capable of performing many of the mental tasks now
performed by human beings, and at greater speeds.

In
February 1994, The Wall Street Journal ran a front
page story warning that a historic shift was occurring in
the service sector, with growing numbers of workers being
permanently replaced by the new information
technologies.. According to the Journal, "Much
of the huge US service sector seems to be on the verge of
an upheaval similar to that which hit farming and
manuafcturing, where employment plunged for years while
production increased steadily... Technological advances
are now so rapid that companies can shed far more workers
than they need to hire to implement the technology or
support expanding sales." ["Retooling Lives:
Technological Gains are Cutting Costs and Jobs in
Services." Wall Street Journal, February 24,
1994.]

Anderson
Consulting Company, one of the world's largest corporate
restructuring firms, estimates that in just one service
industry, commercial banking and thrift institutions,
reengineering will mean a loss of 30 to 40 percent of the
jobs over the next seven years. That translates into
nearly 700,000 jobs eliminated. Many banks are using
voice-mail systems for customer service calls, greatly
reducing the amount of time representatives have to spend
answering enquiries. Automatic teller machines, once a
rarity, have become ubiquitous in US cities and suburbs,
significantly reducing the number of human tellers.
Between 1983 and 1993, banks eliminated 179,000 human
tellers, or 37 percent of their workforce. By the year
2000, upwards of 90 percent of banking customers will use
automated teller machines.

In The
Future Impact of Automation on Workers, authors
Wassily Leontief and Faye Duchin describe the improved
efficiency of automated tellers: "A human teller can
handle up to 200 transactions a day, works 30 hours a
week, gets a salary anywhere from $8,000 to $20,000 a
year plus fringe benefits, gets coffee breaks, a vacation
and sick time... In contrast, an automated teller can
handle 2,000 transactions a day, works 168 hours a week,
costs about $22,000 a year to run, and doesn't take
coffee breaks or vacations."

Debit and
point-of-sale banking are also gaining wider use,
allowing customers at supermarkets and elsewhere to pay
electronically, thereby eliminating cheque writing,
credit clearance, handling, posting, record entry, and
the many other steps involved in processing paper
cheques.

The
insurance industry is also making a quick transition into
the high-tech era. Mutual Benefit Life (MBL) was among
the first of the nation's giant insurance companies to
reengineer its operations. MBL did away with the slow,
cumbersome, multilayered system of processing
applications and installed a single case-manager. Armed
with a new computer-based workstation and programmed with
an "expert system" to help answer questions,
the caseworker can now process an application in less
than four hours. The average turnaround for an
application has been reduced from upwards of 22 days to
only two to five days, allowing MBL to eliminate 100
field office staff while processing twice the volume of
applications as before.

The
transformation of the traditional office from a
paper-handling to an electronic-processing operation will
greatly increase the productivity of businesses and
eliminate millions of clerical workers by the end of the
decade. The nation's secretaries are among the first
casualties of the electronic office revolution. The
number of secretaries has steadily declined as personal
computers, electronic mail, and fax machines replace
manual typewriters, paper files and routine
correspondence. Economists Wassily Leontief and Faye
Duchin estimate that the conversion from paper-handling
to an electronic processing office will save 45 percent
of all secretarial time and between 25 percent and 75
percent of all office-related activity. Receptionists are
also being reduced in number as new automated computer
systems can answer calls, record messages, and even hunt
down the party being phoned.

The
intelligent machine is steadily moving up the office
hierarchy, subsuming not only routine clerical tasks but
even work traditionally performed by management.
High-tech computerised hiring systems have been installed
in hundreds of companies to screen job applications.
Field tests have shown the systems to be at least as
skilled as human personnel directors in making
evaluations and much quicker in processing applications.

Dramatic
gains in productivity have led to the elimination of jobs
in virtually every area of the telephone industry. Recent
technological innovations, including fiber-optic cable,
digital switching systems, satellite communications, and
office automation have kept the telephone industry's
output per employee increasing at nearly 5.9 percent per
year. Between 1981 and 1988 alone, employment declined by
179,800. AT&T announced that it is replacing more
than 6,000 long-distance operators with computerised
voice-recognition technology. Over the next several
years, AT&T expects to replace more than half of its
long-distance operators with the voice-recognition
technology, which is able to distinguish key words and
respond to callers' requests. The new silicon operators
are the latest in a string of technological advances that
have allowed AT&T to handle 50 percent more calls
with 40 percent fewer workers in recent years. The number
of workers employed in central office repair is expected
to decline by more than 20 percent by the year 2000.

Equally
dramatic developments are taking place in the United
States postal service. In 1991 Postmaster General Anthony
Frank announced the replacement of more then 47,000
workers by 1995 with automated machines capable of sight
recognition. The new silicon-sorters can read street
addresses on letters and cards and automatically sort
them faster than postal workers, who often spend up to
four hours a day hand-sorting mail for their routes.

While the
office is being revolutionised by intelligent machines,
so too is every other area of the service economy. The
changes have been dramatic in the wholesale and retail
sectors. Wholesalers, like middle management, are
becoming increasingly redundant in the age of instant
electronic communication. Retailers like Wal-Mart are now
bypassing wholesalers altogether, preferring to deal
directly with manufacturers. With computerised monitoring
and scanning equipment at the point of sale, retailers
can transmit shipping orders directly to manufacturers'
warehouses by way of electronic data interchange (EDI).
At the other end, automated warehouses staffed by
computer-driven robots and remote-controlled delivery
vehicles fill orders in a matter of minutes without the
assistance of human physical labour. Since 1989 the
wholesale sector has dropped a quarter of a million jobs.
By early in the next century most wholesaling, as we have
come to know it, will have been eliminated.

Retail
establishments are also quickly reengineering their
operations, wherever possible, introducing intelligent
machines to improve productivity and reduce labour costs.
In most retail outlets, the use of electronic bar codes
and scanners at the point of sale has greatly increased
the efficiency of cashiers. According to a survey
prepared by the Bureau of Labour Statistics, the new
electronic scanning equipment "permits a 30 percent
increase in ringing speed and possible overall 10 to 15
percent reduction in unit labour requirements for
cashiers and baggers." Some retailers hope to
eliminate cashiers altogether by using new electronic
technology that allows the customer to insert his or her
credit card in a slot on the shelf holding the desired
product. Cashiers are currently the third-largest
clerical group after secretaries and bookkeepers, with
nearly 1.5 million employed in the United States alone.

The
retail sector has long acted as an unemployment sponge,
absorbing countless numbers of displaced blue collar
workers let go by the automation of manufacturing
industries. Now, with retail industries undergoing their
own automation revolution, the question becomes one of
where will all the workers go. Many economists look to
the food industry to rescue the workers cast adrift by
the technological innovations in other sectors. Even
here, though, employment is sluggish, suggesting hard
times ahead for the unskilled and semi-skilled service
workers. In many restaurants, computer systems allow the
waiter to transmit orders electronically, avoiding
unnecessary trips back to the kitchen. The same
electronic transmission can be used by the computer to
prepare a check for the customer and alert the store
manager or suppliers to replenish the stocks being
depleted. A new state-of-the-art cooking method, which
allows food to be cooked in large centralised
commissaries, reduces labour costs by 20 percent in most
restaurants. Some fast-food drive-through restaurants are
beginning to replace human order takers with
touch-sensitive screens that list the items on the menu.
Drive-through restaurants have become so highly automated
and efficient that six to eight employees can serve as
many customers at peak hours of operation as 20 employees
working in a sit-down restaurant.

Electronic
shipping of products will likely mean the loss of tens of
thousands of jobs in the warehousing, shipping and
transportation industries in the coming years. In May
1993 IBM and Blockbuster Video announced a new joint
venture which will provide made-to-order audio compact
disks, video games, and videocassettes through
Blockbuster's 3,500 retail outlets. The store will bypass
the warehouses, shippers, truckers, and loading docks,
and transport products electronically to the customer by
way of the information highway. Each store will have a
kiosk where customers can order selections by touching a
computer screen. The information will be transmitted to a
central computer that will make an electronic copy of the
item required and transmit it back to the store within
minutes. Machines in the store will copy the electronic
information into recordings, CDs and cassettes. Colour
laser printers in the kiosk will reproduce the jacket
pictures with the same clarity and resonance as exists on
preexisting stock. Other retailers are expected to follow
Blockbuster's lead.

Electronic
shipping is only a small part of the revolutionary
changes taking place in retailing. Electronic shopping is
also quickly penetrating the retail market, threatening
the jobs of tens of thousands of sales clerks, managers,
stock personnel, maintenance crews, security guards, and
others who make up the retail employment complex. Many
industry analysts are convinced that electronic home
shopping will take over more and more of the nation's
one-trillion-dollar-a-year retail market. Forbes
calls the new revolution in retailing "a serious
threat to the country's traditional retail industry and
to the nineteen million people it employs."
["The Fall of the Mall," Forbes, May 24,
1993.]

Intelligent
machines are already invading a range of professional
disciplines and even encroaching on education and the
arts, long considered immune to the pressures of
mechanisation. Doctors, lawyers, accountants, business
consultants, scientists, architects, and others regularly
use specifically designed information technologies to
assist them in their professional endeavours. The
nation's 152,000 librarians are growing increasingly
concerned over electronic data systems that are able to
search, retrieve, and electronically tansmit books and
articles over the information highways in a fraction of
the time spent performing the same task with human
labour. Data networks can provide abstracts from
thousands of journals and books within a matter of
minutes. Even the art of book writing itself is falling
victim to intelligent machines. Using software equipped
with artificial intelligence, Scott Finch was able to
program his Macintosh computer to pump out three quarters
of the prose in a torrid potboiler entitled Just This
Once.

Although
novelists may have little to fear in the short run,
musicians have every reason to be alarmed by the new
generation of high-tech synthesising machines that are
fast redefining the way music is made. Piano sales have
dropped by one third to one half in recent years, while
digital keyboards, or synthesisers, have increased in
sales by 30 percent or more in the same period. A
synthesiser reduces musical sound to digitised form. Once
digitised, the sounds can be stored and, when needed, be
combined with other digitised sounds to create an entire
symphony orchestra. In a process called
"sampling", the computer might record a single
note or a combination of notes by great musicians that
can be rearranged into wholly different performances that
were never performed by the artist. Vince Di Bari, former
vice president of the Los Angeles local of the American
Federation of Musicians, estimates that recording jobs
for human musicians have dropped off by 35 percent or
more because of synthesisers. Many musicians compare
their circumstances with those of auto workers replaced
by automation in Detroit.

Even more
troubling than synthesised music is the new technology of
"morphing", which allows movie and television
producers to isolate, digitise, and store every visual
expresion, movement, and sound of an actor and then
reprogram them in virtually any new combination,
effectively creating new roles and performances for the
artist. Nick de Martino, who heads the American Film
Institute's computer lab, says that with the new computer
technologies it is possible to eliminate sound stages,
sets, even actors, and replace them with
"synthespians", which are "created from
libraries of gestures and expressions housed in a
computer bank." Already, Humphrey Bogart, Louis
Armstrong, Cary Grant and Gene Kelley have been digitised
and put back to work in new television commercials. Live
actors and entertainers are going to be increasingly
competing for parts gainst their digitised and stored
past images as well as those of actors long deceased.
["Hollywood Goes Digital," Forbes ASAP,
December 7, 1992.]

The rapid
elimination of work opportunities resulting from
technical innovation and corporate globalisation is
causing men and women everywhere to be worried about
their future. The young are beginning to vent their
frustration and rage in increasingly antisocial
behaviour. Older workers, caught between a prosperous
past and a bleak future, seem resigned, feeling
increasingly trapped by social forces over which they
have little or no control. In Europe, fear over rising
unemployment is leading to widespread social unrest and
the emergence of neofascist political movements. In
Japan, rising concern over unemployment is forcing the
major political parties to address the jobs issue for the
first time in decades. Throughout the world there is a
sense of momentous change taking place - change so vast
in scale that we are barely able to fathom its ultimate
impact.

Reproduced with the
permission of Edward Goldsmith, co-editor with Jerry
Mander, of "The Case Against the Global Economy and
For a Turn Towards the Local" - Sierra Club Books;
fax 1-415-957-5793.